Britons Strike Over Extended Austerity Measures

Public sector workers on Wednesday began Britain’s biggest strike in a generation, a day after the government said that it was falling behind with its deficit reduction plan.

SARAH LYALL and ALAN COWELL

LONDON — Hundreds of thousands of public employees walked off their jobs in schools, hospitals, airports, courtrooms, libraries, museums and government offices on Wednesday, as British workers became the latest in Europe to demonstrate mass fury at government austerity measures.

The one-day strike was the biggest here since the 1970s, the era that brought forth the Winter of Discontent, with waves of labor disputes that all but crippled the country. This time, the immediate issue was Prime Minister David Cameron’s proposal to require public employees to work for more years and pay more toward their pensions each month.

But the strikers’ anger goes far deeper, and as they passed government buildings in Whitehall, some chanted, “We strike right back!” — a reference to the Conservative-led government’s budget-cutting measures, which some feel amount to a war on lower-income workers. Many strikers said that the policy of decreasing welfare benefits and tax credits while also making huge cuts across the board in all government departments had left them struggling at a time of rapidly rising prices.

“I’m still paying off my student loans and that, together with the pension contribution — it’s a lot,” said Lucie Capel, a teacher who has two young children and was marching through central London. At this rate, she said, she is afraid she will be unable to afford to put any money into her pension. “How are we going to recruit the best people to the teaching profession if you offer them rubbish money, terms and conditions?” she said.

The strikers included social workers, garbage collectors, midwives, civilian law enforcement workers, health and safety inspectors, immigration officials, radiographers, librarians, emergency service staff members, customs officers and drivers’ test examiners, along with many others. The unions said that up to two million people were expected to participate; the government said the number seemed to be far less.

About a third of local government employees stayed off work, and the strike affected different services up and down the country. In Glasgow, for instance, the subway was not running; in London, it was. In Merseyside, two tunnels under the River Mersey, used by 80,000 people a day, were closed.

The Education Department said that 13,000 state-financed schools, or 62 percent, had closed, with 3,000 others just partly open. The government’s suggestion that nonstriking employees take their children to work was met with dismay from many parents, like those with low-attention-span toddlers.

But the airports were running smoothly. Dire predictions that the absence of border control agents would lead to 12-hour waits to get through immigration proved inaccurate, at least by midafternoon. Some passengers told the BBC that the lines had never been shorter.

The strike came just after more bad news from the government. The chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, announced Tuesday that because of a swiftly worsening economic outlook that had thrown off his deficit-reduction timetable, public employees’ wages would be frozen for two more years, on top of an existing two-year freeze. He also said that new budget cuts meant that the public sector would lose hundreds of thousands more jobs than he had previously said, and warned that if Europe slid into recession again, Britain would probably follow.

Britain is not a member of the so-called euro zone — it has its own currency, the pound — but its economy is intricately connected to that of the rest of Europe.

There were angry scenes in Parliament on Wednesday, as the prime minister clashed with Ed Miliband, leader of the Labour opposition, over the causes and effects of the strike. Mr. Miliband, whose party receives large financial contributions from the unions, did not explicitly endorse the walkout. But, in a reference to Mr. Osborne, Mr. Miliband said that he sympathized with the grievances of workers who earn in a year “what the chancellor pays for his annual skiing holiday.”

Speaking to Mr. Cameron, the Labour leader asked, “Why do you think so many decent, hard-working public sector workers, many of whom have never been on strike before, feel the government simply isn’t listening?”

The prime minister emphasized the divide between the two parties with language that seemed to evoke the bitter disputes of the 1970s, calling Mr. Miliband “militant, irresponsible and left-wing.”

Mr. Cameron said that the strike, rather than causing massive disruption, had been “something of a damp squib.”

Mr. Miliband accused Mr. Cameron of secretly welcoming the walkout.

Not true, said the prime minister.

“I don’t want to see any strikes,” he said.

Some strikers used the occasion to make digs at Mr. Cameron’s privileged childhood and elite education. Referring to a whipped cream, fruit and meringue dessert named after the prime minister’s old boarding school, one striker’s placard simply read, “Eton mess.” Another read, “Help — my pension is being Eton.”

Marching in the Strand, Alistair Cunningham, who works for the Treasury, said that he and his colleagues were being made to pay for the mistakes of others. “All we want to defend is what is in our contractual right,” he said. “The crisis was caused by bankers, and the public services are an easy target.”

Meanwhile, the unions and the government accused each other of stalling the pension negotiations. Several weeks ago, the government presented what it said was its best offer; the unions countered that the proposal was unacceptable. Neither side has shown signs of budging.

Union officials warned that this might be only the beginning. On Twitter, Mark Serwotka, leader of the Public and Commercial Services Union, said, “The message to the government is if you don’t negotiate with us we will do this again.”